Textmanuscripts - Les Enluminures

DOMENICO CAVALCA, Excerpts from Vite dei santi padri

In Italian, manuscript on paperItaly (Tuscany?), c. 1440-1460

iv (paper) + 128 + i, modern foliation, top, outer corner, pencil, 1-121, followed by seven blank, unfoliated leaves, on paper, watermark, Briquet 6645, Lucca 1445(collation, i8ii-xi12), horizontal catchwords, middle lower margin, no signatures, ruled very lightly in lead with single full-length vertical bounding lines, ruling usually indiscernible, written in twenty-seven to twenty-eight long lines in an upright rounded fere-humanistica script (justification, 161-155 x 110-103 mm.), majuscules at the beginning of sections stroked with red, red paragraph marks, red rubrics, two- to three-line red initials, a few with decorative void spaces within the initial, slightly more elaborate 3-line initial, f. 9, with decorative void spaces within the initial, repair, lower margin, f. 34, tear, f. 57, foxing and staining from damp throughout, with no loss of legibility, many leaves are splitting along the inside margin, most quires reinforced with paper. Bound in eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century pasteboard covered with rough brown paper, sewn on three cords which are stitched through the cover, title on paper label on spine, “ di S. Padri” (cf. note in pen, back flyleaf, “Libri de santi padri,” now upside down), front board detached from bookblock, although it is still attached along the spine, covers stained. Dimension 202 x 137 mm.

This is an unpretentious but well-organized copy of a very popular collection of the Lives of the early desert fathers in Italian. The particular sections of the text included here deserve further study, since they were likely a unique selection chosen by the original owner (and possibly writer) of the manuscript. Although the text itself survives in numerous manuscripts, most are in Italian libraries, and it has rarely been available for sale in recent decades.

Provenance

1. Written in Italy, probably in Tuscany, in the middle of the fifteenth-century, as indicated by the watermark and the script. This is not a deluxe manuscript, but instead one that was probably copied for its owner’s personal use. It is written in a legible script, with simple initials and paragraph marks that divide the text into sections, and includes a table of chapters so one can “trouare legiermente alcuna cosa in questo libro” (“to find something easily in this book”). The text is an abbreviated version the very popular Vite dei santi padri, and it seems likely that the owner chose which sections to include, thus creating his own, unique version of the text.

2. No other clues to its history remain in the manuscript, although it likely remained in Italy until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century when it was bound.

The Vite dei Santi Padri (Lives of the Holy Fathers) is an Italian translation of a collection of writings on the lives and sayings of the holy men and women often called the Desert Fathers, the saints who lived in Egypt and elsewhere in the Near East in the first three centuries after Christ. The translation was the work of Domenico Cavalca (c. 1270-1342), a Dominican monk, and his collaborators. Domenico was born at Vicopisano, near Pisa, and he spent most of his life in Pisa; Although he wrote original works, including sermons and other treatises, he is best known for his translations from Latin into Italian, including the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, the Acts of the Apostles, and his masterwork, the Vite dei Santi Padri (see Thomas Kaeppeli. Scriptores ordinis praedicatorum medii aevi, Romae, Ad S. Sabinae, 1970-, 1:304-314, nos. 832-846).

Domenico Cavalca was proclaimed by one literary critic, Pietro Giordani (1774-1848) “the father of Italian prose,” and while his contribution to the formation of Italian as a literary language is less-well known than that of his contemporary, Dante Alighieri (c. 1265-1321), author of the Divine Comedy, it was nonetheless extremely important. The Vite dei Santi Padri was immensely popular during the Middle Ages. Carlo Delcorno lists one hundred and ninety-one surviving manuscripts (see Delcorno. La Tradizione, Venice, 2000, pp. 7-489, with an appendix describing four manuscripts with other translations, pp. 490-506). Over one hundred of these manuscripts are miscellanies or legendaries which include only excerpts or single lives. The manuscript described here was not known to Delcorno.

Most of the manuscripts of the Vite dei santi padri are in Italian libraries; only four are listed in the United Kingdom, and only two are in the United States, MS 9 in the Bancroft Library, of the University of California at Berkeley, and fMS Typ 192 in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. This last manuscript includes translations that are different from those attributed to Domenico Cavalca. In addition, two manuscripts, now at Columbia and the University of Kansas include small excerpts from the text. Manuscripts of the Vite have been sold only infrequently in recent decades (three can be cited; London, Sotheby’s, 9 December, 1974, lot 41, now in Munich, Staatsbibliothek Cod. Ital. 691; London, Sotheby’s, June 25, 1985, lot 79, and a manuscript currently for sale at Textmanuscripts.com, reference number 221).

The popularity of the text continued into the latter half of the fifteenth century with the invention of printing, when twenty editions appeared between 1474 and 1499 (L. Hain. Repertorium bibliographicum,1826-38, II, pars I, Reprint, Milan, Görlich, 1948, nos. 8613-8627; W. A. Copinger. Supplement to Hain’s Repertorium bibliographicum, part I, London, 1895, nos. 8613, 8615, 8619; Part II, ibid, 1898, nos. 2968-2970; and others, see Domenico Cavalca, Cinque vite di eremiti, ed. Carolo Delcorno, Venice, Marsilio editori, 1992, pp. 294-295; and Cioni, listed below). There is currently no modern critical edition of the text, although Delcorno’s La Tradizione (listed below), has prepared the way. Although there have been numerous modern editions, most are based on the original eighteenth-century edition (see Manni, below; on previous editions, see Delcorno, 1992, pp. 295-296). The text was a fluid one, with many variations from manuscript to manuscript. The excerpts in this manuscript certainly deserve further analysis.

The history of the Latin texts behind the Vite dei santi padri is complex. Although it frequently circulated in the late Middle Ages as the Vitas patrum by St. Jerome, it is actually a collection of texts by many authors, including Athanasius, Jerome, Rufinus, Palladius, and others. The Jesuit scholar, Heribert Rosweyde, published a ten volume edition of the Vitae partum in 1615, and a version was printed in Migne, Patrologia latina, volumes 73-74.